


Lost (and back again)

by Signe_chan



Category: Pacific Rim (Movies)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, M/M, Post-Movie: Pacific Rim: Uprising (2018), Self-Harm, Suicidal Thoughts, see beginning note for details
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-12
Updated: 2020-05-12
Packaged: 2021-03-03 06:00:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,522
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24150091
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Signe_chan/pseuds/Signe_chan
Summary: After they pry they Kaiju from his brain, they send Newt to a remote cottage where they're no chance of him accessing the drift again to recover. Hermann goes with him.Follows from the end of Pacific Rim: Uprising
Relationships: Newton Geiszler/Hermann Gottlieb
Comments: 6
Kudos: 81





	Lost (and back again)

**Author's Note:**

> Specific warnings: This fic deals with depression and Newt had suicidal thoughts. At the beginning of the fic, Newt is struggling to deal with the absence of the Kaiju in his brain and contemplates suicide. Later, he realises that his letting the Kaiju control him caused the deaths of others including Mako: he blames himself for this and feels guilt. He also harms himself, using his nails to damage the inside of his arm. Later, he damages his fingers by digging with his hands. 
> 
> Everything comes out okay in the end and I believe that the descriptions are not overly graphic, they're certainly not intended to disgust, but if any of that is likely to hurt or upset you then please don't read this story. Take care of yourselves, fam.

Newt comes back to himself slowly, then all at once. 

He remembers fragments of the attack. He remembers the feeling of Hermann’s neck under his hand, of not being able to make himself let go. He remembers the kaiju, beautiful and terrible, towering over him. He remembers waking up strapped to a bed, words falling from his lips that he can’t stop. He remembers crying. He remembers Hermann sat next to him, daring to reach out and briefly grasp his hand, like that hand hadn’t tried to kill him. He remembers Pentecost’s kid looking at him in disgust. He remembers begging to die, but the words won’t come out. He remembers screaming. 

When he wakes up, wholly and terribly himself in a way he hasn’t been in years, he cries. 

+

“It’s a little rustic,” Hermann says. He reaches out to brush a layer of dust from the top of a table but hesitates at the last second. Newt would make fun of him, call him fussy, but somehow he can’t seem to make the words come out. It takes all his energy to stand in the doorway, drowning in his borrowed clothing. 

“I’m sure it’ll be fine,” Pentecost’s kid says. Newt can tell from the look on his face that he’d never stay here. “It’s completely off the grid?” 

“We don’t even have electricity,” Hermann says, and Newt winces a little at that. Fuck, he’s not going to be able to do anything. “The house has been in my family for generations. I’d rather forgotten about it, if I’m honest, but when it became clear that Newt needed to be completely disconnected.” 

Became clear, that was a good euphemism for it. What he’d actually done was grab someone’s gun and threaten to shoot them if they didn’t get him a hookup to a kaiju brain again. He’d known even when he was doing it that it wasn’t going to work, his hands were shaking and he could barely stand, but there was so much space in his brain that every thought was echoing and somehow he couldn’t stand it any more. 

“Okay,” Pentecost’s kid says. “If you’re sure. We’ve arranged for someone to bring you supplies every few weeks. Other than that, you’re on your own.” 

“That will be fine,” Hermann says, nodding decisively. 

Neither of them look at him. 

+

The cottage is a fucking mess. Hermann spends his days cleaning it. He launders fabrics painfully by hand in a tub, which has to be hell on his knee. He wipes down every surface. He mops the floors. He goes to war with the spider webs. He beats the rugs. 

He tried to get Newt to do that last one, actually. He puts the beater into Newt’s hands and more or less drags him outside. He says something about working out some feelings. 

What he doesn’t understand is that Newt doesn’t have feelings any more. 

Newt spends his days lying on the couch, breathing in centuries of dust, hoping that, if he doesn’t move, he’ll just disappear completely. He thinks about the gun a lot. He thinks about the weight of it in his hand. He thinks about the wonderful, terrible moment when he could have turned it, put it into his mouth, and blown his own brain out. 

+

One morning, Newt wakes up before Hermann. He stumbles downstairs, stands staring at the couch for a good ten minutes, then puts on his shoes. 

Somehow, everything he owned before ended up in a PPDC evidence room so the shoes are cheap trainers, already worn to the shape of someone else’s feet. They rub as he walks and walks and walks but he ignores them. 

For the first time since he woke up, he’s starting to feel alive. 

He has contacts. He has friends. If he can reach a town, if he can get a phone, he can reach one of them. One of them can find him a brain. He wouldn’t need much, just a slice. Just enough to fill the gaping emptiness in his thoughts, the all-encompassing nothing that he is now. 

Or, failing that, he can walk into oncoming traffic. Perhaps that would even be better. 

The PPDC find him at the sun’s setting. He still hasn’t reached a town, though the shoes have rubbed blisters onto his feet. The officers approach him with drawn guns, as though he’s a threat. 

He lets them take him back to Hermann. 

+

“I promise this will not happen again,” Hermann says, all bluster. Newt watches the movement of his hand as he talks. It’s almost graceful, tracing long curves through the air to illustrate his points. “And no harm occurred.” 

“Not this time,” the woman says. Newt doesn’t know her, but she has that PPDC shine. Pentecost would have gotten on well with her. Mako would have gotten on well with her. 

Mako would still be alive if not for him. 

“If you can’t control him,” the woman is saying, “We’ll have to take him back into protective custody.” 

Months lying strapped to a bed or a chair, helpless. 

“You could kill me.” 

He doesn’t mean to say it. It’s been weeks since he spoke, he thinks. They both look at him, both disgusted but in different ways. 

“Never mind.” 

He turns his head to face the back of the couch and closes his eyes. Behind him, they carry on arguing about his fate. 

+

The first time he feels something, it comes over him suddenly. Hermann’s banging around in the kitchen, talking to him. Hermann’s always talks to him, as though somehow he can sense the emptiness and is trying desperately to fill it. 

He’s not even saying anything important, just narrating his actions, and suddenly anger starts bubbling up inside Newt. 

He’s killed people. 

He doesn’t know how many people died because he was weak, because he couldn’t control the precursors. Filling him in hadn’t been high on anyone’s priority list. Mako, though, for one. His machine, his creation, killing her. How many others? 

And Hermann’s prattling on about the best dish to make a casserole in as though nothing’s happened at all. 

It’s too much. It’s all too much. 

He digs his nails into the flesh of his arm and drags them. The physical pain is, at least, a sharp contrast to the anger building in his gut. He does it again and again and again until the flesh is red and raw and bleeding, until all he can feel is the throbbing pain. 

Newt hears Hermann come into the room, then leave again. Of course, what else did he expect. Hermann’s probably sick of being stuck here with him, nursing the broken shell of a man when he could be out there, reaping the rewards of having saved the world twice over. 

When Hermann comes back, he’s carrying a green box. He kneels by Newt’s side and pulls his hand away from the flesh of his arm so he can’t scratch any more, then he opens the box and takes out antiseptic wipes. The burn of them is almost as good as the scraping had been. They’re followed by a cream, then bandages. Hermann’s lips are thin, he’s finally silent. 

Newt hates it. 

+

The next morning, Hermann takes him out into the garden and points him at the weeds. 

“If you have to tear something,” he says, his first time actually talking about what Newt did to his arm. “Tear up some weeds.” 

He isn’t going to, but the yard’s a mess and clearing enough space to sit somehow becomes tearing up weeds. 

They come easily at first, then he runs into the brambles. Their roots go deep and he actually has to work to get them out of the ground, and suddenly it really matters that he gets them out of the ground. Suddenly, he really fucking hates them. He digs at the earth, throwing aside his gloves and trowel and scratching away the dirt with his nails. He yanks at them and pulls and every one he turns up he throws away and carries on. 

It’s a large garden. 

Hermann comes out after a while and makes him stop. He bullies Newt into washing and changing into clean clothes and eating. 

The next day, Newt goes out into the garden again. 

+

“Why are you even here?” Newt asks. Hermann looks surprised, which is fair. Newt hasn’t exactly been a great conversation partner, but today the need to drift with the kaiju, to open his mind up to everything he can learn from them, is a persistent itch and, as much as tearing up the garden seems to help, the garden won’t fight back. 

“Nobody else would take you,” Hermann says and fuck Hermann, even if it’s the truth. 

“Seems like you should have left me where I was. Seems like you should have let them put me in a cell with a straightjacket.” 

“Would you prefer that?” Hermann asks. He doesn’t even seem bothered by what Newt’s saying, he just carries on pushing the vegetables around his plate. 

“Maybe.” 

“I wouldn’t,” Hermann says, meeting his eye. 

“I deserve to be locked away. I killed Mako.” 

“I thought that was a precursors.” He says it with a glint in his eye like he’d daring Newt to prove him wrong. As though he’s entirely convinced that Newt won’t be able to. 

“I let them in.” 

“You did,” Hermann agrees. “Why? Why did you drift with them again? After everything?” 

Because he’d been curious. 

Because he’d been weak. 

Because it’d thrilled him. 

He stands, pushing away from the table and stalking out into the garden, though the sun’s already setting. He gets to the end of the garden and climbs up onto the wall. He could just walk. He could just keep going. Hermann’ll tell them, he’s obviously got some kind of communication device hidden somewhere, but Newt will know they’re looking this time. He can be smarter. 

Instead, he sits on the garden wall and looks out. They’re somewhere in Scotland, he thinks. He’s never been to Scotland before, but he imagines this is what it’d look like. 

Once the sun’s fully set, Hermann brings him a cup of tea. He lights his way with an oil lamp, even though they have flashlights. Dramatic motherfucker. 

Newt thanks him for the tea. 

+

The next day, he chops wood and offers to help with dinner. 

+

The weird, awkward kind of domesticity they settle into lulls him into a false sense of security. 

That morning, they wake up with the sun. Newt stokes the fire, nearly burnt to embers, in the Aga while Hermann complains about the cold in his toes. When it’s warm enough, they toast bread and eat in silence and then Newt goes outside to pull weeds and Hermann clomps around the living room with a duster. They leave the door open so Newt can hear him complain. 

And Newt remembers the first time he realised something was wrong. 

He’d been drifting once or twice a week, then. He’d been making notes, planning the scientific papers he was going to write. It was before he’d left the PPDC, before he’d acquired Alice and really lost himself. 

He’d been an idiot. 

He’d been sat in the lab carefully dissecting a specimen, he couldn’t even remember which specimen, and suddenly he’d felt this weird surge of anger. He’d known even at the time that it wasn’t his, that it belonged to the precursors, that they were angry that he was so carefully cutting apart the thing they’d gone to such lengths to make. 

He shouldn’t have been able to feel their feelings, not outside the drift. 

He’d told himself it wasn’t real, it was just his imagination. 

He’d told himself that it didn’t even matter if it was real, he was in control. 

Was it already too late, then, or could he have stopped it? If he hadn’t been so fucking full of his own importance, if he’d reached across the lab and told Hermann what he thought had happened, could he have stopped it? 

As he remembers, he crouches on the ground, pressing his fingers into the soil and fighting the urge to keen, to cry out that it was unfair, that he’d never wanted them to take over. All he’d wanted way to learn. 

Hermann finds him there some time later. Newt’s aware of that when Hermann kneels next to him and pulls his hand out of the soil. He nails are a mess. There’s blood. 

He realises, then, that he’s crying. 

“I’m sorry,” he says, not sure if he’s apologising for this specifically, for his nails crusted with mud and blood and the mess that he is, for the situation in general, Hermann trapped here with him in the middle of nowhere, or for everything, up to and including his daring to be conceived. 

“Let’s get you clean,” Hermann says, taking his arm and pulling him to his feet. 

+

It’s a rainy afternoon so he can’t go out into the garden. Hermann is listening to the radio in the kitchen and it’s nice for background noise but also really fucking dull so Newt’s moved back to his position on the couch. 

It takes him a while to notice the copy of science on the coffee table. 

It’s not unusual. Hermann gets paper copies of all the top scientific journals delivered with their groceries. He reads them and critiques them loudly, but somehow they’ve never really caught Newt's attention before. He reaches over now and takes the journal gingerly between his fingers, then pulls it over so he can read it. 

Some time later, he wanders into the kitchen. 

“Have you got a pen?” 

Hermann is peeling potatoes. He looks up, obviously surprised by the request. “A pen?” 

“Polk’s really fucking wrong about the decomposition rate of kaiju connective tissue, I wanted to make a note.” 

Hermann hesitates for a second, then retrieves a pen from a pocket and hands it over. Newt sits down at the kitchen table and makes the correction, then a couple of other minor ones. 

“Have you read Waite’s paper?” Hermann asks. Newt snorts. Hermann’s lips curl up into a smile. 

Somehow, improbably, Newt finds himself smiling back. 

+

The weather has started to turn. Their delivery has more firewood, most of it chopped but enough of it not that, when things are too much, Newt can go swing an axe around and, somehow, that helps. 

It’s dark outside and they’re sat in the kitchen, the warmest room in the house. Hermann is sat at the table with a cup of tea, the crossword in a month-old newspaper spread out in front of him. Newt is lying on his back on the rug in front of the Aga, trying to remember the chorus of a song. 

“It was something about a girl, something about a dress,” he says, bouncing his foot to tap out the rhythm. “Damn, I really can’t remember.” 

“Well, I certainly don’t know,” Hermann says, adding another answer to his crossword. 

“It was, like, famous, I’m sure,” Newt says. “When I was a kid.” 

“Well, I’d certainly have never heard it then. As a child, I never used to listen to that popular rubbish.” 

“As a child?” 

“I have been known, occasionally, to indulge in some popular music. It’s often a disappointing experience. And, of course, I've had any number of songs blasted at me by you.” 

“Blasted,” Newt scoffs though, yeah, he probably did used to play his music just a little too loud to annoy Hermann. 

“Blasted,” Hermann agreed. 

+

He couldn’t have anticipated the storm. 

It shouldn’t bother him. Storms had never bothered him before. Once, he’d stripped naked and run through a torrential downpour, slipping and sliding in the mud and yelling and laughing. 

The sky turns dark just after lunch. Hermann tutts about it and lights the lamp and nothing else is said. It doesn’t need to be said. 

When it starts raining, Newt loses interest in the journal he’s thumbing through and goes to stand in the window instead, watching the rain come down. It isn’t bad, at first. Then it’s heavy. Then it’s worse. 

Then the thunder and lightning comes. 

The thunder seems to roll through his bones, to shake him, and he ends up in a corner without even meaning to, crouching down and pressing his back into the junction where two cupboards meet. The thunder rolls again and he jumps a little. 

It’s stupid. It’s so stupid. He isn’t afraid of storms. 

Hermann looks up from what he’s doing and Next accidentally meets his eye. He looks away quickly, but the damage is already done. Hermann puts down his pen and crosses the room. 

Newt’s expecting to be told to stand up, that he’s being ridiculous, that thunder and lightning won’t hurt him. Instead, Hermann slowly and cautiously lowers himself to the ground and pressed himself against Newt’s exposed side. Like this, the cupboards all down one side and along his back and Hermann on his other side, he can breath again. 

Hermann reached over and takes his hand. Newt clings. 

“You don’t need to sit down here with me,” Newt says, though he doesn’t let go of Hermann’s hand. “I don’t know why I’m scared. I’ve never been scared of storms.” 

“The drift,” Hermann says and, of course, the darkness as they descended down through the precursors world, the massive rolls of thunder that seemed to shake everything, flashes of lightning throwing things both wonderful and horrible into stark relief as he saw, as he realised. 

Hermann had been there with him. 

“After the drift,” he finds himself saying. “Why weren’t we closer.” 

Hermann pauses for a second, tensing beside Newt. “You didn’t want us to be.” 

That wasn’t fair. He had wanted them. 

He just hadn’t known how to say it. 

“I’m sorry,” he says, now. Hermann smiles so maybe that’s enough. 

+

The weather gets worse. Hermann’s in pain, Newt can see it. One afternoon, when Hermann’s trying to soak away the aches in a rare, luxurious bath that had meant both of them spent far too much time boiling water, Newt rearranges the kitchen. 

He drags the table out and replaces it with a smaller table from the back of the sitting room, just big enough for the two of them. Then he drags the sofa through. 

It’s damn difficult and he nearly gets the thing stuck in the doorway but a few good kicks move it enough that he can, eventually, slide it through and set it up where the table had been, right in line of the Aga. He then drags in every blanket he can find and piles them on top of the couch. He even brings through a side table for Hermann’s tea. 

Hermann looks surprised when he comes down, though he doesn’t complain, and that night they sit together on the couch, buried under their blanket pile, and it’s much better. 

+

Of course, it’s very intimate in the blanket pile. 

“I never told you why I drifted with the kaiju again,” Newt says. It’s past midnight and they’re both ridiculously warm, so much so that neither of them want to get up and go crawl into their beds, aware that even the hot water bottles they’d hidden in the sheets won’t really have kept out the chill. 

“You don’t have to,” Hermann says. He doesn’t look at Newt, instead he stares ahead at the fire. “If you don’t want to.” 

Newt nods. He doesn’t want to, but somehow it feels like he has to. 

“If you’d asked me at the time, I’d have told you I was doing science. I really meant to do science. I took a load of notes, Hermann. I was going to write some papers, really redefine the entire field of Kaiju biology.” 

“But that wasn’t the real reason?” 

Newt shakes his head. “I guess it was the thrill, really. The moment of connection to something so much bigger and more powerful than myself. I thought I’d contained it. I thought it was a toy.” 

“And then it wasn’t?” 

“It didn’t happen all at once,” Newt admits. “I keep thinking about it. I can’t stop thinking about it. I knew something was wrong. I was feeling things outside the drift. I started losing time. I started doing things then not remembering later why.” 

“Newt,” Hermann says. His voice sounds pained, Newt doesn’t dare to look at his face. 

“By the time I realised how wrong it was, I’d already changed jobs. And I needed it. I thought I needed it. I craved it. I still do, some days. Some days I think I always will.” 

Hermann takes his hands under the blanket. 

“Sometimes,” Newt admits. “Letting someone else do your thinking for you is really fucking attractive.” 

They sit there with that for a long time. 

+

The day the psychologist comes, there’s frost on the ground. 

She sits and talks to him for hours, taking up the kitchen and its warmth and Newt would worry about Hermann but he’s been whisked off to the local base for some kind of briefing while this goes on. 

He’s honest, or as honest as he can bring himself to be. He tells her it’s still hard, some day. That he’d trying anyway. She nods and smiles and asks him more questions and he answers them the best he can. 

He tells her he wants to be well. 

He wants to go back to his work. 

He wants to live. 

The car brings Hermann back and takes her away. She’s going to write a report and make a recommendation. If she thinks he’s well, if Pentecost’s kid agrees that he’s well, he might get to come back to society. 

He’s not sure how he feels about that. 

+

He wakes up the next morning and trails down to the kitchen. He gets the fire going in the Aga while Hermann makes noise upstairs. Once it’s warm enough to boil water, he fills a water bottle and takes it to Hermann, who thanks him. 

They spent the morning reading some of the journals Hermann picked up the day before. Hermann reads each paper first then passes it to Newt. When they’ve both read it, then annotate it together; sometimes agreeing and sometimes squabbling over the pen. 

Lunch is burgers, a rare treat since they don’t have a fridge to store meat. They waste the afternoon playing card games. They’re both bad losers so they devolves into arguing and accusations of cheating that carry on even as they peel and wash veg to make a stew. They use one of the big pots, though Newt kind of wonders if they’ll need it all. He has no idea how fast it’ll move, if he even convinced the psychologist that he’s stable. He hopes he did for Hermann’s sake, a winter up here in the cold doesn’t sound comfortable for him. 

He also hopes they don’t. 

He realises that as he drops chunks of carrot into the stock. He hopes they don’t find him sane, that they leave him here with Hermann. He hopes they can carry on reading papers and arguing about cards. He hopes he can steal some more of Hermann’s unexpected, quiet acceptance of his mistakes. 

He loves Hermann. 

As soon as he thinks it, he knows it’s right. 

He loves Hermann. 

He has loved Hermann for some time. 

He should have realised before. 

He’s never been one to waste time, not when he can avoid it. He puts down the knife he’d been chopping with and turns to Hermann, who’s peeling potatoes. He takes the knife out of Hermann’s hand, then the potato, then he holds both of Hermann’s hands in his. 

Hermann meet his eyes. 

Newt kisses him. 

+

The beds are much warmer when you share them. 

+

A car arrives with the reply from the psychologist. There are a long list of conditions, of checks, but he can return to society. On a trial basis. 

They pack up the house, putting the furniture back and making sure everything’s clean. The officer sent to retrieve them seems annoyed by the delay but it’s necessary, they might want to come back here some day and they won’t want to walk in on their own mess. 

In the car, under the cover of a coat spread across their laps, Hermann holds his hand. 

+

All PPDC bases are basically the time. The one in England is, obviously, tiny. It’s function was always more diplomacy and fundraising than research and war. They spend a week there, catching up on the news and re-acclimatising to the world. Newt talks to his therapist every day. 

They share one room. 

+

The Hong Kong shatterdown is hauntingly familiar. They arrive at three am and Pentecost’s kid is there to meet them. At some point, Newt’s going to have to start thinking of him as something else. He’s a grown man, not just a shadow of his father. For now, though, he's Pentacost's kid and Newt follows him and Hermann down through a changed labyrinth of tunnels. 

“The lab’s ready for you both,” Pentecost’s kid is saying. “And your quarters, Dr. Gottlieb, are just as you left them. Dr Geiszler, we set aside a room for you. We’ll look at moving you into a suite as one becomes available.” 

“That won’t be necessary,” Hermann says, tone stiff and formal. “Dr Geiszler will stay with me.” 

“Ah Hermann, you old romantic,” Newt says, elbowing Hermann in the ribs and earning a glare for his troubles. “You asking me to move in with you?” 

“I believe me meaning is clear,” Hermann says which meant yes. Pentecost’s kid’s saying something about how it’s no problem but Newt ignores him, leaning in and kissing Hermann’s cheek, which makes Hermann blush. 

“Newton,” he hisses. “You know how I feel about public displays of affection.” 

“Sure do,” Newt agrees, grabbing his hand. “But, you know, all relationship involve compromise.” 

Pentecost’s kid doesn’t offer him a separate room again. 

+

Newt wakes that morning in bed with Hermann. Hermann is snoring lightly and wrapped around Newt like a fucking snake. 

Newt loves it. 

The day’s going to be busy. Whatever Pentecost’s kid says about setting up the lab he’s pretty sure he’s going to have to mess around with it to get it how he wants it and it’s going to come with new research assistants so he’s going to have to set up meetings with each of them to find out what they’re working on and how their research interests overlap. 

He’d still kind of worried about being around kaiju parts again but he’s got a call with his psychologist scheduled for the afternoon and Hermann’s only going to be on the other side of the room. 

And after, he’ll buy Hermann lunch and let Hermann bring him home and then, well, anything could happen. 

He pokes at Hermann to get him moving then starts to climb out of bed and, for the first time in years, he feels wholly and fucking brilliantly himself.


End file.
